Augmenting Human Decision Making: Machine Intelligence Could Help Eradicate Most Chronic Diseases
Victor Chapela Suggestic
Everyday we make thousands of small decisions. We choose what to wear, which route to drive and which TV channel to watch. Most of these decisions have been automated by our brains. We decide based on mental short-cuts that encode what has worked for us in the past.
Human decision-making evolved to get us through life almost without thinking. If something makes us feel good, we repeat the behavior; if it makes us feel bad, we avoid it. We encode these actions in simple mental heuristics and we make most of our decisions without pondering them ever again.
Few daily choices have such a profound and long-lasting impact, as what we choose to eat or drink. Most chronic health conditions stem from poor dietary choices, which in turn start with repetitive and habitual food selections.
Machine Intelligence will change the way we make decisions. We used to remember many phone numbers and birthdays, now we rely on our mobile computers. We used to carefully choose routes to drive some place new, now most of us rely on our mobile GPS.
But we still choose our groceries, choose what we are going to cook or choose what to order at a restaurant. All of this, without considering the hundreds of potential ingredients or portions and the incalculable relations to our genetics, our microbiome, our mood, our preferences or the long term implications to our health.
Every person, when eating something new is like a little evolutionary experiment. If we can log and learn from each meal, we can eventually discover the complex causation between who we are, what we do, what we eat and our health.
With Machine Intelligence we have started to tackle this problem. Full human decision augmentation will allow us to choose our food wisely. And we as humans, will learn to trust and rely on our mobile decision-making enhancement.
Five years from now, we will no longer be choosing our own food. Five years from now, we may be in the path to eradicate most chronic disease.